doma cases are slightly different. i think the doma challenge is much narrower challenge and i expect it to be much more optimistic about a kind of flat-out ruling that this is unconstitutional by the supreme court. the reason i think that, melissa, doma doesn't require any state to change its marriage laws. all it says is the federal government is going to return to what the federal government was always doing before. we were talking about federalism issues earlier in the show. in the history of marriage, the federal government has always deferred to state definitions of marriage. let me give you an example. some states allow first cousins to marry, others don't because of prohibitions, incest concerns and things like that. whatever the state definitions are, the federal government has always followed the state definition. if a state says they're married, the federal government says for the purposes of benefits they're married. in 1996, the defense of marriage act departed from that practice and said the federal gover